Kim and Jeremy in Thailand

Yet again, the river Ping in Chiang Mai has overflowed its banks and flooded parts of the downtown area. This doesn't affect us directly; we are high and dry over on this side of town. But several of the families represented here at Grace are having to evacuate their home for the third time in about six weeks. Please pray for them as people are getting quite discouraged. Everything they had just cleaned and replaced after the last flood is under water again.

But on the bright side, we all were praying not to receive the brunt of the typhoon, and God answered those prayers! The typhoon turned north and we only got a small amount of rain, so we are just thankful that we didn't get dumped on like the original forecast. It's so exciting to see God controlling the weather like that!

It's raining here, but that's all so far. No need to picture us driving to school through Hurricane Rita. As far as flooding, that really depends more on how much rain they're getting up in the mountains, because it all runs down to us. Right now, things are fine. We'll keep you updated!

We had been hearing reports about a typhoon headed our way, but to be honest, almost every day lately we're hearing rumors of flooding. We were celebrating because this is the 6th day in a row with no rain, a record since we've been here. But as you can see from this weather map, a typhoon (very similar to hurricane) is headed our way. It's the big threatening purple blob. They're saying that if it is still strong when it comes our way, we can expect more flooding. For reference, weather moves east to west here, and on the weather maps, here's an indication of where we are:


Interesting. We'll keep you posted.

This has been a week with lots and lots of time with parents for me. At the end of last week, we had a few days of parent-teacher conferences. That was interesting! It made me wish that there were Cliff Notes for life so I could pick up the yellow book on "How to Have a Parent-Teacher Conference When You've Never Taught Before." Actually, I can think of a few other titles that would be helpful as well-"How to Drive With Motorcycles Zipping Around You", "How to Get Around In A Country That Doesn't Use Maps or Street Signs", and "How to Pay Your Bills In Thailand-When to go to 7-11 and When to go to the Post Office" are a few that come to mind.

At any rate, I had one student who I was concerned about, and her family invited me over for dinner last night. We had spaghetti, which I have dearly missed in this country, and sat around for a few hours and they told me stories from all the places they have lived and the pets they have had. It was a really nice evening, and I hope we can get together again sometime.

It did stop raining (thanks for praying!) so yesterday turned out to be not so bad on our side of Chiang Mai. Downtown, the river flooded again, though not quite as bad as last time, still enough for people to have some cleanup to do. Our side of Chiang Mai dried out however, so we almost felt like we were skipping school yesterday. I went with some friends to see the new Bewitched at the mall, which was quite cute actually. Then we had dinner at the Salad Place, which had good food and a great atmosphere. We ate outside, in front of a wall of water, with music playing, in the middle of an adorable garden. It was a very much appreciated, albeit unexpected, day off.